Assessment of The Strategic Planning Practice in Higher Public Institutions: in the Case of Dire Dawa University.

This study aims to assess the role of the strategic management process in higher public institution performance, in the case of Dire Dawa University. The strategic management process as an independent variable includes a group of four perspectives, namely environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation. The strategic performance as a dependent variable also includes a group of four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth. Data were collected through questionnaires from purposively selected key informant research participants who were capable of providing deep information which includes planning & monitoring, strategic planning team members, medium and top level of university leaders also staff members (from both academic and administrative); and through interviews from DDU strategic plan technical team members of (GTP III, 2020-2030) were selected. The results of this study showed that all independent variable were significant and positive correlated with dependent variable, however, stakeholders’ participation in the process of strategic planning was found to be low; less emphasis was given to critically assessing DDU’s ever changing external environment while planning, The researcher recommends that clearly communicate the responsibilities of the staff (both academic and administrative) toward the university’s prioritized strategic issues and preferred strategies before starting full-fledged implementation process of the strategic plan, introduce adequate monitoring, follow up and evaluation mechanisms for the strategy implementation practices and assess progress made towards the achievement of the strategic targets and also for updating and revision of plans based on the feedback.